Hey guys, welcome to my first-ever
tutorial! Here I'm going to go over
something I'm seeing a lot of users
struggling with in their comics:
Pregnant
Characters
These are examples of pregnant characters
I've seen around here lately:
First let me go over
why they're wrong.
This is a biological impossibility.
Babies don't grow in the stomach
at all, so putting the bump above
the pants line makes no sense.
...I don't even know what the
heck is going on here. The
bump is kinda in the right place,
but it looks like it's
going over the top of the pants.
There are many factors you have to consider when making a pregnant character.
One very important piece is the conception. Women can discover they're pregnant via pregnancy test as soon as the day after they've had unprotected sex, but if a test is taken that soon and it's negative, that doesn't mean it's not going to happen. Conception can occur even five days after
the unprotected sex. Plus, false negatives and all that.
Another thing I've noticed in series is the girl gets morning
sickness a day or two directly after having unprotected
sex. This is very unlikely (But strangely not impossible).
Pregnancy nausea is due to rapidly changing hormone
levels and heightened senses, and that will occur at least
three weeks after conception (the average is six, however).
Now we get to the actual
look of pregnancy.
Every woman is different, every pregnancy
is different, every newborn is different.
Some babies are born bigger than others,
some women gain weight, some don't.
So, for simplicity's
sake, I'll go over
the things that should
remain constant.
If you're going to have a pregnant character, I would
highly recommend keeping her in a dress, or a shirt/pants/skirt
combo that could be a one-piece throughout the pregnancy.
This is for masking ease.
If you insist on using pants with a belt or
a loose shirt, you're gonna have a lot of
trouble, plus, I ain't about to go over
that nonsense.
I'll start with the dress.
First, remember that babies develop in the uterus, which
is located in the woman's lower abdomen. We'll say it's
early in the pregnancy, so the bump will be small.
Never, ever use the full circle. It's too much roundness
for a pregnant belly, no matter how far along the
broad is. Instead we'll use the quarter-circle shape
like this:
What I generally do is use the thin outline of the shape and
place it on the lower abdomen of the character like so.
Then I use the hex code of the dress for the hex code of
the shape. If you don't make sure they match, masking is going
to look really, really bad.
Then I copy/paste the shape and select the solid color option.
Your first instinct is going to be to use a solid black shape
under a solid colored shape...don't do that. It's super hard
to match up line thickness (as you can see in the second, third,
and fourth panels) and it shifts too much.
Take the solid copy of the shape and make it just a little bigger.
You're gonna want to leave a little give at the bottom
of the bump if you're doing this in the 3/4 view to give
some semblance of shape to it.
Place it over the straight edge of the outlined shape.
(I made it red so you can see size and positioning.)
in the next part I'll go over
the shirt/pants combo. It's a
little more work but once you
get used to doing it, it's not a big deal.
That's basically it for the one-piece dresses...if you
want to add shading or whatnot to it, knock yourself
out. I personally don't; I think it looks fine without it.
Just remember pregnancy bumps are round and should
be shaded as such.
(Cont.)

Can someone PLEASE help me I cant figure out how to rotate my semi-circle thingy that I use for the pregnant lump thingy... Whenever I click the rotate button and try to rotate the circle thing, it ends up rotating the WHOLE panel instead ... please help :\